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Like a lot of other people in London, I was moved to get down to Downing Street
straight after work last Wednesday after the news broke about the Johnson
administration’s cunning wheeze to suspend Parliament.

It’s certainly proven the emptiness of one of the justifications of the
monarchy: that it provides a safeguard against tyranny.
Last week it was shown to be pointless.
It is the prime minister who really enjoys the royal prerogative; the monarch
is just an implementation detail.
For a while, #AbolishTheMonarchy became the top hashtag on Twitter in the UK.

But you’re just over-reacting. It’s not a coup!

Well, it hasn’t happened yet, but it had enough of the indications of an
attempted self-coup.
Apart from some kind of aloof satisfaction, what’s the point in holding
back our language when they call us collaborators, saboteurs, citizens of
nowhere, and enemies of the people?
Especially when they’re trying to do something outrageous.

But it’s perfectly normal for Parliament to be prorogued before a Queen’s
Speech.

Yes, for a few days or a couple of weeks at most. Not for five weeks. And
especially not for five weeks at a time when the country hurtles towards the
cliff edge of the abrupt overnight severing of fifty years of social and
economic integration.

But Parliament was going to go into recess for most of that period anyway, for
the party conferences.

Recess is not the same thing as prorogation: no committees sit, any bills fall
away, and the executive rules unchallenged. And Parliament decides whether and
how long to go into recess for itself.

But Parliament wasn’t doing anything important anyway.

There’s the government’s own Domestic Abuse Bill. That sounds important.
So is preventing the government from sabotaging the relationship with the rest
of the EU and forcing the UK to crash out for narrow party interest by making
sure that Parliament has no time to stop them.

Although there’s a limit to what protest can achieve, I do think we achieved
something. We showed that there is strong opposition to constitutional tricks
to silence Parliament. Once upon a time, we were told that Brexit supporters
would be out on the streets if the UK didn’t leave the EU on 29 March, that
we had to appease them to stop the inevitable violence, but that date came and
went.

The idea of an executive coup, on the other hand, mobilises a lot of people.
Enough people to fill up Whitehall last Saturday.
Enough people to
put Johnson off his speech
by chanting “Stop the coup!” outside the gates of Downing Street on Monday
night.
Enough, perhaps, to persuade some Tory MPs to look around and realise
that they were being led by the baddies.

For now, it looks like the Johnson/Cummings plan has failed. The government has
lost its majority, and expelled twenty-one of its more moderate members by
withdrawing the whip.
Even the Prime Minister’s own brother has quit the government and the party.
The Conservative Party is shrinking before our eyes into a smaller and smaller,
nastier and nastier, populist English nationalist form.
It’s in government, but not in power, and can’t even get an election.

However, we’re now in a world in which the old constitutional conventions are
shown to be just that: conventions that lack teeth in the face of an
adversary determined to do anything. Johnson says he’d rather “die in a ditch”
than request an extension to the Brexit deadline, despite the pending
legislation mandating him to do so. We can’t trust them with conventions, and
perhaps we can’t even trust them to obey the law.

The Conservative and Unionist Party tried to save itself with the EU
referendum.
It will end up destroying everything, including the meaning of every word in
its name.

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I finally received the SoloKeys open source
FIDO2 U2F security keys I
ordered via their KickStarter last year.

They’re little USB devices that you stick into your computer to act as a
physical second factor when authenticating to websites (or, potentially, other
software).
Instead of typing in a code received via SMS or from an authenticator
application, you press a button on the device and it cryptographically
identifies itself.

On a long solo train journey on Sunday evening, I implemented a quick and dirty
web version of a Popular Word Game. I’m calling my implementation
Egg Lob, for reasons that I’m sure will be obvious
to players of this game.

The government can confirm that it has no plans to alter the current make up
of UK coins and notes in circulation.

Inflation has long since robbed them of a useful role, but in a country so
obsessed with its imaginary glorious past (see also: Brexit), it’s easy to
understand why getting rid of them is a battle no one in government wants to
fight.